The distro is the slickest that I have seen off late. If you are a purist you'd appreciate its default boot option that only loads free drivers. But since you are a new user I guess you'd prefer the other boot option which loads proprietary drivers. It works flawlessly on the laptop that I use for most of the reviews and articles (with AMD graphics, Atheros WiFi, Cando touchscreen).

And its lack of graphical package management is a bitter sweet thing (especially for you). Since you want to "learn" you can use Arch's pacman CLI package manager to get a grip on things. That said it's got a "Bundle Manager" tool that'll fetch and install popular apps such as Firefox, Thunderbird, FileZilla, Eclipse, GIMP, MySQL Workbench, with the press of a button.

I have been using OpenSuse for a while but it is a bit fussy about proprietary drivers. That is, it will install a open source driver even when a better proprietary one is available.

You may agree with that, but I lost patience with my latest update of Suse when trying to re-install a driver from NVidia was a complete foul-up, and judging by the OpenSuse forums I am not the only one with the problem.

So I am currently trying Mepis (11.0), who's motto is "It just works". It tends to be touted as a beginners distro, which has put me off, and indeed some aspects of it are a bit too simple for what I am used to. Eg the install tends to put most stuff in one partition, but I can sort that out later.

But as they say, everything just worked. It even put in the right printer driver - goodness knows how as the printer is across a network and switched off at the time.